Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page | 'Nice girls play with dolls'

Nawal El-Saadawi, 'priestess of secular feminism' is back. Having returned to Egypt from self-exile in the United States two years ago, she has been busy working towards her many goals -- trying to set up a union of Egyptian feminists, for example, or preparing for the international march to take place on International Woman's Day in March 2000. She has also been lecturing on feminism and creativity in various countries around the world. But we may be grateful that she has taken time out from her busy schedule to write her autobiography, A Daughter of Isis being the English translation of its first part, for it has much to tell us about the background and early life of this most well-known of Egyptian feminists in Europe and in the United States.

Saadawi left Egypt in the autumn of 1993 following reports that her name was on a militants' 'hit list', and she took the opportunity of four years spent at Duke University in North Carolina to write about her life. "Why am I writing this autobiography?" she asks. "Is it longing for my past life? Is my life over, or is there something left? ... [Is it] to struggle against death, to exist now, or even forever? Am I trying to discover what is buried deep down inside me, to reveal what is hidden through fear of God, the father, the husband, the teacher, the male or the female friend or colleague, through fear of the nation to which we belong, or those we love?" It seems that what she knew for sure, however, was that in order to be able to write about 'the painful and sensitive issues' of her life, and possibly to answer some of these questions, she had to be thousands of miles from Egypt and to be completely cut off from her past. El-Saadawi, who is now 68-years-old, tells us that she has been wanting to write about her early life for more than thirty years, and, now that she has done so, she has revealed much about herself that readers will find by turns fascinating and shocking.

Her circumcision at six by a daya (midwife) was, she says, one of the most painful things that ever happened to her. It was a turning point in her childhood. "Since I was a child, that deep wound left in my body has never healed," she writes. "But the deeper wound has been the one left in my spirit, in my soul... I still remember it, as though it were only yesterday." And it was this experience of circumcision that, she says, first made her aware of what it means to be born female in a traditional, or 'patriarchal', as she likes to call it, society.

Saadawi with Hetata (translator and husband)

However, not all of the memories described here are as painful or as sensitive. The book, in fact, covers a relatively short and uncontroversial period in Saadawi's life, taking us through only to 1951 (she was born in 1931). This, therefore, is a book about the childhood, adolescence and formation of Nawal El-Saadawi, and not one about her long career. Readers of Daughter of Isis may have wanted and expected to read a book about that, and, if so, they will not have too long to wait, for part two of El-Saadawi's memoirs, which was published in Arabic last year, is due soon in English. However, even this second volume stops in 1959, when El-Saadawi was 28.

Nawal El-Saadawi was the first girl to be born in a family of nine children, six girls and three boys. While her book contains no dedication, it seems clear that it was, in some sense, written in homage to El-Saadawi's mother, Zeinab. This mother-daughter relationship seems to have shaped the young Nawal's life, and on the first page of her book, she writes confessionally as follows, "I loved my mother more than my father... The smell of my mother's body is part of me, of my body, of its spirit, of the hidden strength I carry with me." El-Saadawi's strength and self-confidence, in fact, seems to have had quite a lot to do with her mother's saying that 'throw Nawal in the fire, and she will come out unhurt'. Nawal, on the other hand, writes that she is still amazed at her mother's strength and pride.

Of her father, El-Sayed, a school inspector, Saadawi comments that he was "a just and kindly man", and says that her political awareness developed under his tutelage. He was, she says, a nationalist, who opposed the king and the British occupation of Egypt. "He was loyal to his country, faithful to the woman who shared his bed." He encouraged the young Nawal to think and to read, and his influence caused her to love Arabic literature. However, Saadawi says here that throughout her life, despite her intellectual closeness to her father, she has felt emotionally closer to her mother. "Throughout his life, he never kissed me once," she says.

Of her eight siblings, El-Saadawi only talks about her eldest brother Tala'at in this book. He used to hate school, and always did badly there. Quite a contrast to his younger sister's conspicuous success, despite the constant refrain in the family that "he is a boy and you are a girl", and therefore was to be excused. By this point it had become very clear to Saadawi's family, and especially to her mother, that Nawal was very different from her sisters, and, in fact, was different from most girls of her age. She "hated dumb, lifeless dolls that could not move from their places like an airplane or a boat, or let out sparks like a pistol." But when she played with pistols, she was told that 'nice girls play with dolls'. Looking back on her childhood and its largely female milieu, Saadawi says that "Nothing in the life of these women ever attracted me. I didn't see myself becoming one of them, opening the cards to read my future, or pulling off the hair from my body and shrieking with pain. The life of women appeared to me to be full of pain. Around it floated the odour of onions and garlic; of laziness and apathy." She was different and, therefore, she was alienated: "I was proud of my country despite the almost constant alienation I felt towards the society in which I lived. I dreamt of another world on earth and in the heavens... would not believe in a country which robbed me of my pride and freedom, in a husband who did not treat me as an equal, in a God who made me only half a human being."

From the age of ten, she had to fight against getting married. One of her earlier suitors, a peasant from her village, refused to marry her when he knew that she could read and write. She scared away many other prospective husbands by smearing her teeth with black eggplant and emptying tea on their laps. However, the desire to have an education was not the young Nawal's only reason for fighting off these suitors; for, when "I was six years old," she writes, "I learnt these three words by heart and they were like one sentence: God, calamity and marriage." When Saadawi did get married, however, it seems to have been a fulfilling and valuable experience nevertheless. She does not write much about it here, saying "what is the use of writing about a love story, which died more than forty years ago?", but she does say that Ahmed, her first husband, whom she met during a demonstration against the British in 1951, "gave me the most precious thing he can give, my daughter Mona."

The young Nawal El-Saadawi started to be politically active while still at secondary school. She says that she loved the Arabic language and literature while at school. "Arabic literature became linked to Islam. Religious belief became a part of my deepest feelings. I forgot my childhood, how I don't know. From a child who had doubts about the justice of God, I was transformed into a reasonable, deeply religious girl." Later, when Saadawi had left secondary school with distinction, she opted for medicine, since that was her parents' wish. "I was not attracted by the medical profession," she writes. "It seemed unable to do much in the face of the sufferings imposed on people." Writing, fir her, "became a weapon with which to fight the system." Reading this latest instalment in Nawal El-Saadawi's writing career, one sees that her sense of fight is undimmed.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875